“Yeah, stupid,” Linda said. “If this place ever braked there’d be stuff everywhere.”
“Pell did, once,” Jeremy said. “So did this place. It totally wrecked.”
“In the War,” Fletcher said. “They didn’t brake. They went unstable. There’s a difference.”
“Shut up, shut up,” Linda said, and shoved Jeremy with both hands. “Don’t get technical. He’ll be like JR, and we’ll have to look it up!”
He was moved to amusement. And a sense that, yes, he could be the villain and log them all with assignments.
But he wouldn’t have liked it when he’d been anticipating a holiday, and if he hadn’t forgiven Chad for the hazing, he didn’t count it against Jeremy, who’d have to be included in any time-log he might be moved to make against Vince and Linda.
“So what do you want to do?” he asked the expectant threesome, and got back the expected list: Vids. Games. Shopping. And from Jeremy, over Linda’s protests, the aquarium.
He laid down the schedule for the next three days, pending change from on high, and distress turned to overexcitement. “Settle down,” he had to say, to save the furniture.
The Pioneer was a comfortable lodgings—good restaurant, good bar—game parlor to keep the junior-juniors occupied at all hours, which was no longer JR’s concern.
Well… not officially his concern.
He was mirroring Francie this stop. That meant that whatever Francie did— Captain Frances Atchison Neihart—he did, mirrored the duties, the set-ups, everything. He didn’t bother Francie with asking how he’d performed. He just ran ops on his handheld just as if it were real, and, by sometime trips out to the ship, checked the outcome against Francie’s real decisions. Every piece of information regarding crew affairs that Francie got, he got. Every page that called Francie away from a quiet lunch, he also got. Every meeting with traders that Francie set up, he set up in shadow, with calls that went no further than his personal scheduler, without ever calling ship’s-com on the unsecured public system or betraying Finity ’s dealings to outsiders who might have a commercial interest in them, he continually checked his own performance against a posted captain’s.
It was occasionally humbling. The fact that he’d been in a noisy bar and hadn’t felt the pocket-com summon Francie to an alterday decision on a buy/no-buy that would have cost the ship 50,000 if he’d been in charge… that was embarrassing.
Occasionally it was satisfying: he’d been able to flash Francie real data on a suddenly incoming ship out of Viking that had a bearing on commodities prices. That had made 24,000 c.
And it was just as often baffling. He’d never done real trade. Madison and Hayes, their commodities specialist, had schooled him for years on the actual market theoreticals he’d not paid adequate attention to, in his concentration on the intelligence of ship movements they also provided. But the market now became important. He usually didn’t lose money in his tracking of his picked and imaginary trades, but he wasn’t in Hayes’ class, and didn’t have Madison’s grasp of economics. Madison enjoyed it. The Old Man enjoyed it. He tried to persuade himself he’d learn to.
Anything you were motivated to buy came from somebody equally convinced it was time to sell. That was one mock-expensive thing he’d learned at Sol. And a good thing his buys were all theoretical.
But trade was not the only activity senior crew was conducting. He first began to suspect something else was going on, by reason of the unprecedented set of messages Francie was getting from the Old Man. Meeting at 0400h/m; meeting at 0800. Meeting not with cargo officers, but with various captains of various other ships, at the same time Madison and Alan were holding similar meetings. The Old Man had been socializing with the stationmaster, very much as the Old Man had done at Pell… but more surprisingly so. The Old Man had a historical relationship with Elene Quen. It would have been remarkable if they hadn’t met.
It was understandable, he supposed, that the Old Man wanted to meet with Mariner’s authorities, considering that Finity was a new and major trader in this system.
But there was anomaly in the messages that flew back and forth, notes which didn’t to his mind reflect interest in trading statistics. There was nothing, for instance, that they traded in common with several of those appointments; there was a requirement of extreme security; and there were requests for background checks on every ship on the contact list, checks that had to be run very discreetly, via an immense download of Mariner Station confidential records—which were open to both Alliance and Union military, by treaty, but they were not part of the ordinary course of trade.
All these meetings, a high-security kind of goings-on. Whatever the captains were saying to other captains didn’t bear discussion in the Pioneer’s conference rooms.
He could miss items when it came to trading. He didn’t fail to notice a care for security far greater than he’d have judged necessary. A ship traded what it traded. She didn’t need to consult the captains of other ships in such tight security. She didn’t need to consult the stationmasters of Mariner in private meetings that lasted for ten hours, in shifts.
She didn’t need to have an emergency message couriered by a spacer from a shiny alleged Union merchanter that happened to be in port—the quasi-merchanter Boreale , which if it hauled cargo only did so as a sideline. It was a Union cargo-carrier, it wasn’t Family, and it set the hairs on JR’s neck up to find himself facing a very nice-looking, very orderly young man who just happened to drop by a hand-written and sealed message at Finity ’s berth.
Union military. He’d bet his next liberty on it. The physical perfection he’d seen in aggregations of Union personnel made his skin crawl. But the young man smiled in a friendly way and volunteered the information that they’d just come in from Cyteen.
“I’m pleased to meet you,” the young man said, shaking his hand with an enthusiasm that cast in doubt his suspicions the man was azi. “You have my admiration.”
“Thank you,” was all he knew how to say, on behalf of Finity crew, and stumbled his way into small talk with a sometime enemy, sometime ally who wasn’t privileged to set foot aboard. He was sure the courier was at least gene-altered, in the way that Cyteen was known to meddle with human heredity, and he was equally sure that the politeness and polish before him was tape-instructed and bent on getting information out of any chance remark he might make.
They stood behind the customs line, short of Finity ’s entry port, where he’d come to prevent a Union spacer from visiting Finity ’s airlock, and talked for as long as five minutes about Mariner’s attractions and about the chances for peace.
He couldn’t even remember what he’d said, except that it involved the fact that Mariner hit your account with charges for things Cyteen stations provided free. On one level it was a commercial for their trading with Union—a ridiculous notion, considering who they were. On the other, considering they were discussing details about Cyteen’s inmost station, about which Cyteen maintained strict security, he supposed the man had been outrageously talkative, even forthcoming. Had the man in fact known what Finity was? Could their absence in remote Sol space have taken them that far out of public consciousness?
No. It was not possible. People did know. And it had been decidedly odd, that meeting. Like a sensor-pass over them, wanting information on a more intimate level.
When he conveyed the envelope to the ops office inside the ship and the inner seal proved to be a private message to the Old Man—he was on the one hand not surprised by the address to the captain in the light of all the other hush-hush going on; and on the other, he became certain that the whiskey bottle was only the opening salvo in the business.
“Sir,” he said, proffering that inner message across the desk, in the Old Man’s downside office, next door to ops. “From Boreale ?”